Hollywood, the city where stories either become world renowned or go to die. We have all seen movies that cross that fine line between good and bad, balance on that precarious edge of quality material versus fan-service. It’s a common tale that all of us are familiar with a consumers of media. So why is it that Hollywood willingly takes a well-written story that stands on its own and tampers with it, occasionally running it into the ground? This was the recurrent thought that popped into my head while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula”.
It’s not that the movie as a whole was terrible, the makeup was well done and the costumes proved to be interesting, but I didn’t understand the need for manipulating Mina and Dracula into a romantic relationship. The movie opens in a scene of war where Elizabeta, who turns out to be Mina reincarnate, kills herself because she thinks her lover Dracula has been killed. In a very Romeo and Juliet-esque manner, Dracula turns out to still be alive and stabs a cross out of anger at Elizabeta’s death. This turns Dracula into a vampire. A couple hundred years down the road, we see the two reunited again as Mina and Dracula, two people drawn together for some reason they don’t quite know. Perhaps this choice was artistic license, but at the end of the day, I believe that it doesn’t make the movie one of better quality.
Perhaps things would have been more solid if they kept to Bram Stoker’s version of Dracula and just kept all the sexual undertones within the movie. Around half if not more of the characters in the book were preyed upon in a sexual manner, so if the movie was trying to provide sexual fan-service, why didn’t they take that route instead? I believe this is because the director wasn’t comfortable with producing an adaptation that was homoerotic.
For those of us who have read Dracula, we know that Dracula preyed upon both Jonathan and Mina Harker in a sexual manner. Dracula even makes the statement that he will attain all the men of the country through their women, a declaration that pretty blatantly exposes him as a queer character (Stoker). It doesn’t stop there either, Dracula lays claim to Jonathan, shouting “he is mine” when fending of the female vampiresses (Stoker). But instead of sticking to this version of the story, Coppola attempted to pack all the sexual action of the book into only the heterosexual encounters of Jonathan encountering the three vampiresses, Lucy trying to seduce all of the men, and Dracula romancing Mina. Each of these encounters are obviously heteronormative and reject what the book Dracula was attempting to portray, namely the recognition of the homosexual in society (a term that had just been coined) and the fear of said homosexual.
By glossing over the significance of the homoerotic undertones throughout Dracula, Coppola tampered with a well constructed story and erased a significant chunk of its meaning. If he had maintained the story line instead of reverting to the typical long-lost heterosexual lovers trope, the movie would have been substantially more meaningful.
